Inflated MySpace Page Views Explain 10-Cent CPMs

from the whip-page-view-inflation-now dept

Several months ago, we noted that something wasn't adding up when it came to MySpace. Ostensibly they are one of the most viewed sites on the internet, yet their ability to pull in revenues seems almost pitifully poor. This became the subject of much chatter this weekend, as The New York Times pondered the same question. According to one web designer, at issue is the MySpace's design, which produces a large number of extra page views each time a user accesses the site. With a superior interface, the user might get the same experience with a third (or less) page views. Advertisers understand that a lot of the page views are redundant, thus explaining why they're not will to pay too much for ad impressions -- giving MySpace a reported 10-cent average CPM. What isn't clear is whether the company would be better off improving the site's usability. Undoubtedly they'd improve their CPM, but it might be at the expense of their stature as a top-ten internet destination -- something that's helped fuel a lot of their hype. Some publishers have openly stated that they won't adopt more efficient design techniques, out of fear of reducing their ad impressions, and thus revenues. Ultimately, this seems like a bad strategy. Nobody likes a cab driver that takes the scenic route, just to drive up the fare. Eventually, people will gravitate to sites with superior usability. It's better to become one of those, than to foist bogus page views on the users and advertisers.

Streamling

Hey, has't Google streamlined the Google Mail service as well as many OTHER services they provide.
They're still making revenue from ads. Maybe someone should wake and see the propective money-maker here.

Re: Myspace

streamline - now!

One factor not mentioned is the possibility that streamlining might afford major performance improvements. Many MySpace users experience service blackouts when volume peaks in the early evening - all adding up to lower page hits I'm sure.

Streamlining might boost performance, making such blackouts a thing of the past and to one degree or another, balancing out CPM.

Finally!

Finally, something to tell those yapping mid-20's pseudo-hipsters that talk about how myspace is such a revolution. I hate that site. The only reason people are on it is because they feel an obligation since their friends are on it also. Too bad nobody taught "Tom" some CSS, page layout, and usibility skills.

making pages takes up views

I also believe that building your page takes up many many views. I may go on tweaking my page many times and hitting submit in various pages. This also inflates the page views. I would personally discount the MySpace reported pageviews by as much as 80%.

What is relevant is the amount of time people are spending on the site. This has to be monetized. This MySpace is good for brand building, but not for "call to action ads"

Adam Brown

"The only reason people are on it is because they feel an obligation since their friends are on it also. "

No obligation felt here, although it IS nice to find people I haven't kept in touch with just by searching name/area. Don't let your impression of the users lead you in the wrong direction, it's a great idea - like classmates.com.

CPM?

Thanks for the clarification of what CPM stands for. I pride myself on knowing a lot about the tech industries, but I can't keep track of all of the TLAs (Three Letter Abbreviations) out there. Please in the future follow standard journalistic practices and identify acronyms the first time you use them in a story, except in obvious cases (like USA, WMD, WTF, etc.)

I bet you could write a sham story about ExtrapoTech releasing a new RFD in spite of the suit from DotComDotNet over copying its WWF technology in the PIP chipset, and nobody would blink an eye.

Buy an Island

It's time for Tom to cash out, Buy an island somewhere in the south pacific and enjoy the rest of his days away from poor internet design, and efficiency. The new American way... Stumble upon a good idea, make a buttload of cash and settle down. Step away from the web design Tom, let the pros handle it. Oh and Biker John, bummer way to start the week...

I've been disappointed ... loving imeem.com though

This "new social Internet stuff" is pretty funny to me ... If you want the long version of that statement you can read my March zine on my web site ... ... and that article is what got me curious about these "social sites." I'm afraid I fell totally into geek user mode for a few years, blinked, and I've been missing out on what I loved most about AOL 10 yrs ago -- the social network.
So I started exploring ... I also have a Xanga and an Imeem.com ... found out that I am very much a minority ... over 45 ... woman ... loves geek stuff ... and somehow i missed out on having a music obsession ...
I also found out that myspace is exhausting because of the click click click and it's ABSOLUTE OBSESSION with flashing advertising ... good grief ... i thought that went out at least 5 years ago ... I thought everybody who knew anything knew that those were ... what ... [nice words search] ... ah ... garish, irritating, and immature design elements. My work around is to inflate myspace's page load count ... F5 F5 F5 F5 F5 ... eventually I'll get a Google word ad ... or sometimes I get lucky and the flipp'n ads disappear altogether!
So but ... I found a niece of mine and a friend's daughter ... and some interesting causes to follow ... so ... i play with it some.
AND then ... I started having Internet connection issues ... it was dragging and it was intermittent and i suddenly felt like i was back on 14.4 dial-up out in the country on a partly line (you haven't faced your Internet addiction until you've tried to connect this way.) ... Bottom line ... I couldn't work on MySpace at that point.
Here's the deal ... I'm a geek right? so who do my friends turn to when they get curious about new stuff? Me. And what do you think I'll be recommending?
Things I've noticed ... Xanga is letting the users enter their own Amazon codes. if myspace is ... I've not found it. Imeem.com ... They've got the RSS feed fun and games dept cornered. Also their chat tool ... sweet ... AIM Yahoo MSN and GOOGLE. Advertising? Absolute minimum with clean display.
have fun,
pamElise

Website with diapers on

That's MySpace. Of course their design sucks. It is for kiddies still sucking down juice boxes for lunch. It's a silly site. Most users don't have money. It is mostly just for teenage boys who are trying to get laid. Why advertise there? It is like paying for ads in the bathroom of a Chuckee Cheese.

well said

Well said Anonymous Cow! MySpace is teh ghey. Its for nubs who are to lazy to learn to make a site and copy and paste a bunch of crap from other sites. Im just glad my group of friends at school arent myspace n00bz!

Hey!

MESPACE

See my space was a good idea that got out of wack
The way i see it is the people that over see my space have to be in class most of the day and home when the stree lights come on so with all that in mind,It was doomed from the start you can't run a co if your mom makes you turn your computer of at 8pm I don't understand how myspace is not a money cow for the CEO and his playmates .......With all the people around the world that buy into it it seems to me a 6 yearold could understand hjow to get rich with it ..

Re: MESPACE

Yeah, myspace was sold a while ago for an insane amount of money to News Corp. ( Fox; Rupert Murdoch ) I don't think Tom has anything to do with it anymore.
It is good for the few friends of mine that learned how to use email a year ago. They paste scripts into myspace and get to pretend they're awesome html designers or something. I've ran into people I haven't seen in over ten years there so it's not all bad. As for the adds, I'm in agreement about the annoying flashing ads but I've noticed that very few of them even load while using Mozilla.
http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2005/07/18/web_20_peak_myspace_sells_for_580_million.ht ml

What the web WAS

Don't you get it? Myspace really represents what the web was in its "info superhighway" heyday, i.e. - bad graphics, poor design, low bandwith, and connectivity. You gotta hand it to the kids that missed it the first time around. They got pretty close to replicating 1994...or was it 95?

Seriously though, the do it yourself mentality of the early days of the web made it exciting. It's no wonder teens (and others who missed out before) are excited about making their own little web spaces, no matter how tacky and unrefined they might be. And unlike the early web, your friends can actually FIND you. None of my friends could ever find my Tripod pages back in the day.

background pages dumb

LOL Ya'll Sound Older than ME!

Freakengine has it right. It's just fun to create your own stuff without having to understand it all. I've always had a website and several I built with Dreamweaver and serveral I built with online tools.

Now, I'm using a very complicated online tool to (badly) build my site. It has several databases that I created and use. I don't understand how they work ... I just know how to type in the field names I want and how to click on the little tool and tell it "display this field here."

I have a few places where I use RSS feeds on my web site. All I have to do is copy and paste the RSS feed addy into a little window ... and poof! RSS feed displayed on my site ... then i get to clean it up and make it display nicely but that's about four more clicks. It's so much fun!

I use the tools badly really ... the creators of the tools make drop-dead gorgeous sites.

But back to MySpace ... and the bad designs that people create ... they really aren't a Myspace, the company, fault. If a body were so inclined, they could make almost every free blog page out there look uh like they were replicating ... mmm ... freakengine ... i'd say it was mmm I got married in 99 ... 98 was college ... (yes, I started life over at 40) oh yeah ... it was 97 & 98 & even 99 ... 99 things were "improving" some but only because the advertising departments were taking over ... well that's how they tell it.

As far as MySpace, the company goes, yes, they could stop using the infantile game ads ... but look around you ... look at just the tech news industry alone. I mean just because the marketing department and the graphic designers move in and make it look more mature ... is it really improvement?

The ads are still flash based and they still they drag the page load down and they still visually distract me so much that i have a personal mantra that goes ... "i will stay only long enough to get the info ... do not look ... do not click."

ok but, again, back to myspace -- the users -- this is the thing that really floors me as a woman ... these little flashy whirly cutesy things that people post in comments ... yeah ... why haven't their designs matured any? ... i don't understand ... i think there's this whole sub-culture that really loves these things ... i keep wondering what their homes look like ... are they full of bad hand-crafts from the 70's, and 80's? ... ok i've thought about that long enough to be scared ... never mind ... i didn't bring it up.

And this probably needs a major clean up ... but I'm going to go walk and have coffee with my husband ... and pretend there's a real world.

Cabin Boys on Parade

Anybody in this chatfest on MySpace aware that Cabin Boys TOm Anderson and Chris DeWolfe have been outed on the Internet as mere fronts for the people who really owned and peddled MySpace to Fox in a fire sale that resembled a teardown of a fake storefront before the bustout and the crooks left town in the dead of night.
Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe did not create the success that has many puzzled, the brains and money behind MySpace's dodgy rise to the top were Clarence B. (Uncle Bud) Coleman and his wife Joan of San Leandro Calif., and Andrew Alan Wiederhorn and his wife TIffany of Portland Oregon.
As Trent Lapinski correctly and astutely notes in his blogs on MySpace, the myth of the nerd DeWolfe and the free-spirit Anderson sitting around some seedy dot.com shack eating pizza and dreaming dreams is horsehoickey, an example of the masterful cons of the Wiederhorns and the Colemans, both disgraced human beings known up and down the coast of Oregon as, well, folks you couldn't trust as far as you could throw them. Some reading is indicated by those who talk aobut MySpace and a good starting place would be Trent Lapinski's blogs, Jason Lee Miller's webpro stories, the ongoing attempt by Wikipedia to undo the lies of those who would thwart the truth-tellers, and aslo check out my posting three weeks ago in the Catbird Forum of the Elephant Nest, and then ask yourself if you want Uncles Bud and Andy and Aunts Tiffany and Joan to be baby-sitting your thirteen-yearold who lied to get into MySpace and then, of course, had to llie to Mom and Pop also, and, gee, kids can learn to lie in MySpace, which is no place like home. al macleese, from Hallowell Maine, which is where life is as it ought to be.

Near PC

Re: Cabin Boys on Parade

Cabin Boys on Parade, Part 11:
In May 1 ooar here I bemoaned the fact that the mainstream had not picked up on the wave of chatter on the Internet about the outing of the mere cabin boys Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe; you will recall Trent Lapinski and I averred they were, and nobdoy has responded in the negative, so one must assume that the dead tree press is a lot deadern than some of us had feared. But we are talking up some of the slack: Trent Lapinski, the guy who wouldn't truckle to the MYSpace meanies,s has a freelance mag article comiing out in next few days, I understand and I, in my halting and fumbling way have posted a whole bunch of rants on Konspiracy Korner, Sounds of Crickets Churping, and perhaps chatters in space might like to listen intoi my ravings as I wail and gnash my teeth over the dismal sight of the hidden owners of MySpace, the disgraced West Coast bizness baddies Clarence B. (Uncle Bud) Coleman and his indefatibgable wife Joan, the San Leandro Calif. entries, and Andrew Alan Wiederhorn and his combativemate Tiffany, the Portland Ore couple known now as the Battling Wiederhorns since they are fighting and feuding with Lance Caldwell, the U>S.D.,A who put Andy away, on grounds that he was jealous of the arrogrant merchaant prince, and also dukin it out with the Multnomah Athletic Club, which gave him the boot and now Andy sez he will fight that out to get badk into where HE IS NOT WANTED, BUT, HELL, READ THE RANT ON kONSPIRACY kORNER, i NEED TO GET SOME SLEEP.... OH, CHRIS AND TOM GOT WEBBYS LAST NIGHT, THE oSCARS OF THE dIGITAL WORLD FOR TWO GUYS NBAMED CHARLEY AND MORTIMER. AL MACLEESE FROM HALLOWELL, WHERE LIFE IS LOVELIER THAN WHERE YOU ARE..

MySpace doesn't have to be ugly

I find all these conversations very hilarious. Part of MySpace's draw is their terrible layout and horrific standard template layout. These factors allow the users to get on, customize their page a little bit, and feel like at least it is better than what they got to begin with. They made it better, all by themselves... well, themselves and the whole cottage industry of layout sites out there. What I want to hear about is the profitability of the template sites. Are those guys making money?

And by the way, MySpace doesn't have to be ugly. Any dork with a half-wit's capacity for design can look up all kinds of guides on writing their own pages.

And then there are those of us that actually put some time into their page and have something to be proud of. It is a way to stand out.

TD, Big noises looming on or about this lovelyfourth, celebrating the battles wom mostly by Mainers, the hardiest of the New Englanders. THis is Al MacLeese from Hallowell, the one who has been yapping about how the stealthfounders and profiteers from MySpace, andy and tiffany wiederhorn,of the Portland HQ of the mob, and Clarence Bud Coleman and genial wife Joan, have not received credit for their anonymous efforts in creating a place wherein children can be easily fleected. But my companion-in-virtue in trying to help out the louts, Trent Lapinski is going to rectify the news blackout that the MSM imposed, perhaps in a trance; Lapinski's blockbuster is imminent, Nick Dentonof Valleywag, the shock troops for the Gawker battalions, sez, but he's been saying that for a spell and I meanlysuspect he is just building up the suspense until, like Clancy, he lowers the boom, i.e., Lapinski, who I knew back when. So it is indeed a glorious fourth, what with the glad tidings from Santa Monica and Burlingame due any minute, and there isn't a striper in the lovely, gently wafting Kennebecd River, who won't leap and dart with thenews that the Wiederhorn-Coleman Hole-in-the-Heart Gang has been given a taste, at leasts, of a comeuppance.

All this talk about view-inflation... this is a bit off topic, but it seems like this is a 'room' full of folks in the know. How might a band on Myspace boost their profile views quickly? Any loopholes in the system you'd be willing to share...?

i want to close my myspace page

Re: You Loser

Adam you need to get a life mate. people go on myspace jus to hav a laf meet new people hook up with friends etc. thats wot i do. but your too much of a sad sinik to realise that. i bet all your friends are losers that secretly hate hate you because you seem like an asshole. get a life; get a myspace

OMG You lot are soooooooo bitchy!!

1) Myspace bad design - its desiged mostly by USERS not geeks and WE DONT MIND the lack of perfecto standard design. Its not like our lives depend upon it, and MY friends are the only people reading mine anyways!! So get over it! Geez

2) Flash Ads - Are you just stuck in the dark ages?? Download firefox and adblocker; problem solved! I cant remember the last flash ad I saw on myspace....

3) Page views - Nobody cares about page views apart from bloody marketing wank-heads so that is also irrelivant!

4) In my experience the only people who moan about myspace, are people who dont have the necessary personality to get any replies from people on there (or any other social networking site for that), or people who flamed and then got ignored by all and sundry, just for acting like little childeren throwing their toys out of their pram!

Please ..... its sad!

STOP MOANING ABOUT MYSPACE - It has clearly given you a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and something to talk about which you obviously had missed out on previously.

Somebody needs a life :) Maybe you could find some friends on myspace?? That is if you drop the bad attitude :)

Re: CPM?

I am very new to Google adsense and I have just viewed my stats and it states that my CPM's are standing at $244.80.
I don't know where this came from and could you please explain what this means?
Up to now my earnings are only $0.49cents.
Does the CPM's mean that is what I owe to Google Adsense?
If this is the case then I might as well cancel this programme as I am not gaining anything out of this.
Would you know about this and please help me.
Regards,
Bediveare.

tabbed browsing's effect?

Along these lines, has anyone looked into the effect of evolved browsing habits (such as opening lots of tabs at once before going through them) on other traditional statistics, such as time spent on page?

Social Networking

MySpace has a lot to learn from other sites that have streamlined their sites and minimized pageloads. Advertisers also need to wake up and see that they're paying less per click/impression; but those impressions aren't always being seen. As long as MySpace is as large and popular as they are though, they're going to do whatever they want to do though.

Custom Social Networking

Those that say the MySpace has to learn anything are wasting their breath. MySpace has cemented itself and that is the way they plan to stay. As far as ads go unless the business is an already established presence they are avoiding MySpace like the plague. Smart advertisters are going after the smaller niche social networking websites.

Myspace is a great place to find people that are looking for what you offer. There are so many different groups and it is possible to start your own interest group. More and more people are using myspace and it is not just the "younger" crowd anymore. I know retired people that are interacting via MySpace.